


In the Infirmary

by hestia_lacey



Series: On the Pier [2]
Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Angst, Episode Tag, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-18
Updated: 2011-04-18
Packaged: 2017-10-18 08:31:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,332
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/186950
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hestia_lacey/pseuds/hestia_lacey
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Second part of my On the Pier series. After speaking with Jeannie out on the pier, John visits Rodney in the infirmary.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In the Infirmary

By the time John finally fits the broken-up pieces of himself mostly back together, the first moon is at its white-gold nadir, a hazy half-circle half-immersed in the horizon and its sister has risen full and silver-bright in the broad sky. The edges of the secrets he spilled to Jeannie are still diamond sharp and feel dangerous where they lie out in the open, but there’s a thrill in their exposure that makes John feel suddenly brave; when they gather themselves up off the pier, Jeannie takes his hand firmly in hers and pulls him towards the infirmary, towards Rodney, and John goes without protest.

She leaves him at the infirmary entrance without a word, hand slipping out from under his, and smiles sadly at him as she walks away. John watches her disappear into the after-midnight shadows and then weaves into the shadows himself, moving to Rodney’s bedside unseen to stand in the doorway where he can observe unnoticed.

John watches Rodney sitting on the bed for a long moment, then another and has to blink when he realises what Rodney’s doing.

Rodney is writing. The furrow of his brow and the way his fingers grip the pen are familiar and at the same time completely incongruous; John thinks of whiteboards and markers, styluses and touch screens and painted warning signs, but he’s never seen Rodney just… write.

He has actual paper and real ink and is writing furiously, almost recklessly, bent close to the page. John can see blue-black smudges of ink on his quick moving fingers, on the smooth curl of his hand, painted onto the skin where Rodney hasn’t cared to let the ink dry before pressing on, as though just getting the concepts out onto paper was more important than making them legible. As John watches, Rodney reaches the end of a page and tears the completed sheet out of the notebook with one hand; the other brings the pen nib down onto a blank page almost without pause, ink spilling animated and eager and already three lines down the paper.

The discarded sheet flutters to rest on the mess of covers Rodney has pressed to the bottom of the bed and John’s breath catches. In the bright spotlight Rodney has shining over his shoulder John can make out the dark letters scratched into the paper. Only they’re not letters at all but another language entirely, the language Rodney knows best, the one he uses elegantly, eloquently: math. There are numbers, rows and rows of numbers scrawled in Rodney’s distinctive, bold script, margin to margin: pi to what must be a hundred places, equations describing light and energy and movement, interaction and resistance, the substance of things John can’t even begin to truly understand, and it’s that - of all things, it’s the goddamn numbers - the delight and desperation in the strokes of Rodney’s pen that makes his eyes burn and his throat tighten because Rodney is really alright, reallyhere, and everything he – they – almost lost is brutally real again.

The pieces he carefully put back together out on the pier rattle in their fixtures, unsound, and John doesn’t think he can walk up to Rodney and come away again without cracking, shattering all over again and that… Rodney doesn’t need to know that about him. He almost turns away, would have, but as he moves quietly back from the door, he steps straight into Keller.

“Colonel!” She exclaims in shock, reeling back, hand rubbing at the base of her throat as thought to settle her pulse as she steadies herself against the doorframe.

John might have apologised, but at her shout, Rodney’s eyes come up from his paper and meet John’s for the first time since his impromptu surgery: sky-blue, thinking eyes, hazy with numbers, and John is struck suddenly dumb, breathless.

“John!” Rodney says, smiling broadly, and if it wasn’t for those eyes, the equations at the tip of Rodney’s stilled pen, the simple, open happiness on Rodney’s face would scare John senseless.

“Um, hi,” John says when he can push words around the heavy something that’s jumped, beating furiously, into his throat. Rodney is still looking at him, eyes sharp, and John feels like he’s balanced on the cutting edge of that gaze, one unwieldy word away from slicing himself open. It’s terrifying and exhilarating all at once: Rodney could bleed every hidden truth from John if he just pressed hard enough, and John doesn’t know if he should hold still and let him, just for the thrill of knowing Rodney can do it, or shy away from Rodney’s piercing, assessing stare.

Caught up as he is, John hasn’t moved and Keller pushes him forward into the room with a sigh, stepping out from behind him and rounding Rodney’s bed to check the monitors at his side. John watches Rodney watch Keller, eyes flickering over her body, watches Keller run a scan, pick up a needle and phial. He doesn’t know what to say, where to look and so says nothing at all, drops his eyes to the floor.

It’s awkward; John shifts self-consciously and Rodney looks back at him, smiles that easy smile again and just as John opens his mouth to say something, to try and explain, Rodney speaks.

“Hey, did Jeannie find you?” he asks as Keller rounds the bed, sets a tray down on the high table at the head and takes Rodney’s arm in her hands. “Because she was looking for you earlier but she wouldn’t say wh– ow! What the hell was that for?” Rodney looks down to his arm and then up to Keller as she slides the syringe plunger back, drawing sample of blood. Rodney winces and she smiles apologetically.

“Sorry. It’s just some final testing,” she explains. And then in a soft, quiet voice John was never supposed to hear, “I want to be sure, Rodney.” She withdraws the needle, caps the phial and strokes one hand along the length of Rodney’s arm from shoulder to wrist, wrapping her fingers around his and clenching them gently, still tight and long enough for Rodney to blush faintly, stammer out “Well, yes. You should, I mean, I - ”

And John won’t take this away from Rodney, but as much as he wishes otherwise it hurts to witness this, and before he realises he’s even opened his mouth, he hears himself say:

“Yeah.”

Rodney’s gaze snaps back to him, confused. “What?”

“Jeannie.” John explains, waving his hand to the doorway in a gesture he recognises as Rodney’s. Then, “She found me.”

“Oh, right. What did she want?”

“Nothing, really,” John says.

“Uh huh.” Rodney’s scepticism, his outright scorn adds colour to his voice and until he hears it, John hadn’t realised how much he missed all the shades it could be. “It’s never nothing. My sister always wants something.” Rodney lifts his hands as he speaks and Keller moves away, gathering her samples together and making a note on Rodney’s electronic chart.

“We just… you know, talked,” John repeats, hand rubbing at the back of his neck and trying very hard not to think about falling to pieces in front of Jeannie Miller.

“Talked. My sister ‘just talked’ to you?” Rodney’s hands drift up, trace disbelief and shape sarcasm in the air between his palms and when his fingers form quotation marks around the words he dislikes, John has to bite his tongue to stop a smile, dip his head to hide it when it breaks out anyway. When he looks back up, Rodney is looking at him expectantly and while John can already hear what comes next he purposely doesn’t answer because he’s missed Rodney’s biting impatience too. Three, John counts, two, one and then right on cue Rodney snaps “Well, what about?” hands raised to frame the question.

“Nothing,” John says, conscious of Keller moving at the periphery of the room. Instinctively, his eyes flick sideways, a fluttering second, to where she stands and Rodney with his quick, clever eyes catches the glance; his eyes widen, his mouth thins, and he looks quickly down at the sheets, swallowing hard.

“Not too long, Colonel.” Keller says, backing out of the room with a bright, oblivious smile. “My patient needs his rest.”

As soon as she’s gone Rodney starts talking, twisting fabric anxiously in his fingers as he speaks in a panicked rush: “It was about the recordings wasn’t it? About, about what I said to – God, she is such a – what did she say? Did she ask you about us? Because since that thing with Katie she’s been suspiciously - ”

“No. No, she didn’t,” John says, stepping up to the side of Rodney’s bed and resting his fingers lightly on the skin-warm covers.

“Oh.” Rodney says, slumping as his rant is unexpectedly derailed. “Okay.”

“She told me you were awake.” John offers quietly, stepping closer still and shifting to sit on the corner of the bed, turning sideways into Rodney. The unsteady pieces jammed into his frame settle; he feels less disquietingly brittle sitting here but raw nonetheless.

John reaches down the muss of blankets piled at the foot of the bed and picks up the discarded sheet of math. The paper is poor quality, thin and yellow and creased already, but the impress of Rodney’s handwriting makes his fingertips tingle where they drag across the ink. “How are you feeling?” he asks.

“Better.” Rodney says, grinning broadly at the page in John’s hand and then gesturing towards the bandage at his temple. “Despite the trepanning.”

If the image Rodney’s unconscious body hadn’t imprinted indelibly onto the back of John’s eyelids, if the sense-memory of Rodney’s head between his palms wasn’t so strong, if he couldn’t still taste Teyla’s sorrow, Ronon’s grief like they were his own, that might be funny.

But he can and it’s not. It’s not funny at all.

After a long, dark moment of bleak silence punctuated only by the rhythmic rasp of John’s fingers over the surface of the paper they both speak at once. “Okay, look I - ” and “Rodney - ”

John doesn’t think he can speak again right now; his index finger has caught on the pi symbol and is fixated on its curves and angles, on the strokes Rodney used to form its shape, on what it means.

Beside him, Rodney moves ever so slightly closer, takes a deep breath and says, “I just… I wanted to say thank you.”

No, John thinks, no, shaking his head, clenching his hand into a fist and crumpling the paper, “Rodney, you don’t have to - ”

Rodney reaches out, folds his hand over John’s before he can move away and forces his white-knuckled grip on the page to loosen. John can feel Rodney’s eyes on his profile but everything is rattling again and he daren’t move in case something important shakes out of place.

“Yes, John, I do,” Rodney says, so quiet and certain and sincere. “I’ve seen the recordings. They were… well, they were difficult to watch. I can’t… I can’t imagine what it must have been like to witness th-that first hand.” Rodney stumbles over the words and it’s not because he doesn’t know them but because they’re difficult to put out in the open. John knows. His heart stumbles right along with the syllables nonetheless and just like out on the pier he wants to get up and get away from the feeling clawing at his chest but this is Rodney, Rodney sitting here talking to him, after everything that almost happened, and he can’t move.

“And I, I didn’t exactly make it easy for you,” Rodney says, swallowing hard. “I know I, that I… asked… I asked for you a lot.”

John hears his own name echo in his memory, a terrified scream, and never wants to hear it sound like that again.

“Rodney…” he says, concentrating fiercely on smoothing out the paper again, folding it neatly into half and in half again, and not at all on the way his throat is closing up, the way his eyes are burning.

“And you were always there,” Rodney says, and John pretends the way the ink smudges on the paper is because of the sweat on his palms. “I don’t remember much but I... I remember, I knew you. Of everyone, I remembered you. You… you’re always just… there. And I don’t, I’ve never thanked you. For that. Before. So…”

John can’t help the quiet sound he makes then. A hitch in his breathing that catches at the back of his throat and chokes him; Rodney looks at him, startled. “John?”

John couldn’t speak even if he wanted to, so he quickly tucks the folded sheet of paper safely under his wristband then turns and folds himself into Rodney, fitting into Rodney’s arms as best as he can, ignoring the startled sound Rodney makes and pressing his face into the curve of his neck where he can feel Rodney’s pulse beat against his cheek.

John just breathes for a long moment, then another. Rodney’s arms fold carefully around his shoulders, Rodney’s cheek rests gently on John’s crown as though he can see all John’s uneven edges, knows how fragile the joins between the pieces are.

The words come easier like this. John speaks into the hollow at Rodney’s throat, a raw whisper that takes more energy than he’d like to admit. “You don’t have to ask, Rodney. I’m always going to be there. You’re stuck with me, so… so deal with it. And you don’t have to thank me, okay? Not ever.”

Rodney’s breathing is uneven and he swallows once, again. He tries to push John back, to look at him, but John can’t right now, presses himself in closer.

“Alright,” Rodney rasps, soothing, “alright.”

Keller will be back soon. Teyla and Ronon will visit too, and by then John thinks he might be able to move, push everything back down and away and be something like normal. But not right now.

Not right now.


End file.
